Week 4 - Ascend your Start-Up - Product Market Fit

    When evolving the business from going to market to scaling, the business must fix the product market fit disconnect. "Product market fit tells you if your product is marketable" (Yu, 2021). Your product market fit changes over time depending on your growth stage, product features, partner dynamic, geography, geographics, and more. You must perfect two key areas: distribution channel strategy and customer scaling. For instance, a small company would use cold calling and a small team of sales to grow sales. A larger company would fine cold calling to not be efficient enough, so they would use distributors and other third-party sellers.

    A company must scale its customer base to scale. This means you must have the customer at the forefront of your mind. When your customer relies on you, you become an essential solution provider. If you expand your product offerings, you can then position yourself to become an essential brand. For instance, the company Ninja started out as producing a device that could chop and slice vegetables. Now they offer a brand of kitchen appliances ranging from high-scale pans to air fryers.

References

Yu, Helen. (2021). Ascend your start-up. Made for Success Publishing. 

Week 4 - Guerilla Marketing Developing a Plan

    The two most important things that lead to success in guerilla marketing are starting with a plan and committing to that plan. However, you must first develop a plan that you can confidently commit to. You must research your target market, your offerings, and customer buying trends. You must ask yourself important questions to effectively position your product or service. What is my competitive advantage? What are the benefits of my product or service? What is likely to cause me to fail? What is my goal?

    There are seven aspects of an effective guerilla marketing strategy that you must consider. Consider the purpose of your marketing. Do you want people go to your website, visit your store, or call a phone number? Then consider how you will achieve this purpose y using your competitive advantage. What is your target market? Do extensive research of the customer demographics of your market. What marketing tools should you use to reach this target demographic? Consider what your product stands for and what your niche is to differentiate you. Identify your business and what the purpose of it is. Finally, consider your budget. As stated in previous blogs, guerilla marketing focuses more on creativity and energy rather than spending a lot of money. The average US business invested 4% of gross revenues in marketing (Levinson, 2007).

References

Levinson, Jay Conrad. (2007). Guerilla marketing: Easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business. Fourth edition. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Week 4 - Surfing the Tsunami

    AI is constantly changing how we work and conduct business. AI is growing more and more prevalent. Like any other scientific advancement, people must evolve to the changes or be left behind. The first step to accepting AI is adapting. The next step adopting AI into your management system. The last step is being directly involved in the advancement of AI.

    Adapting is not just waiting around and seeing what happens. Adapting means the business must move from being passive to being proactive.  It is helpful to look at the trends of AI to see where the technology is likely to head. Practicing with AI is also helpful in adopting more advanced technology. For instance, play around with a spend tool that can accurately forecast inventory needs. Once you become familiar with the software, you will have a better idea as to what spend software AI is capable of and how it can be even more useful when fully utilized.

References

Kelsey, Todd. (2018). Surfing the tsunami. 

Week 3 - Ascend Your Startup Minimum Viable Team

    Last week I discussed, the minimum viable product (MVP) which is the most basic form your product needs to take in order to go to product. A minimum viable team (MVT) functions in a similar way. It is the leanest form of a team that is required for the business to operate. The minimum viable team must meet basic criteria in order to work. All members must have a common purpose, clear roles, at least 3 members, balanced personalities, and measurable objectives (van der Geest, 2017).

    The minimal viable team must also have adequate leadership. For it to be successful and scale, the MVT must have four leadership styles. The thought leader envisions something that does not yet exist. They form the path that the company must take in order to succeed. The challenger is a leader who challenges whether a new idea has value. They make sure there are no unnecessary risks and expenses. The collaborator is a leader who makes sure each different member works as a unified team. Finally, the operator carries out the execution of tasks with predictable and sustainable results. Each leadership style balances each other out and ensures success (Yu, 2021).

References

van der Geest, Edwin. (2017). Minimal viable team, self managed. Prototyping Work. https://medium.com/crafting-empowerment/minimal-viable-team-self-managed-2416a882506d

Yu, Helen. (2021). Ascend your start-up. Made for Success Publishing.

Week 3 - Surfing the Tsunami Perspectives

    The rise of AI is happening whether we like it or not. Optimists look at the potential gains for society, AI will help us improve job efficiency. However, pessimists of AI typically look at the potential job loss. Automation is already replacing manufacturing workers. There are kiosks where you order food that replace cashiers. We are still far away from self-driving vehicles but this technology can eventually replace truck drivers.

    I find myself to be a realist when it comes to AI. I am already seeing the benefits in my position as a supply chain analyst. Spend software can easily analyze past purchases and predict future usage. Logistics software can track truck shipments and create a model that plans trucks to improve efficiency. Whenever a new technology is introduced, people do lose jobs, but jobs are also created to maintain this new technology. For example, when farming equipment such as tractors got better, farming took less people, but people were also needed to maintain this technology. This can be different when it comes to AI. If AI can maintain and improve upon itself without human interaction, then society could end up with a lot of people losing work.

References

Kelsey, Todd. (2018). Surfing the tsunami. 

Week 3 - Guerilla Marketing Commitment

    Guerilla marketing is an extremely useful tool, especially for small businesses. The start-ups of the world that do not have the cash to spend on a Super Bowl ad need to use ingenuity and energy to have an effective marketing strategy. However, small businesses will need more than that to be effective at guerilla marketing. Levinson (2007) gives numerous secrets to guerilla marketing including confidence, content, and involvement. Levinson says the most important word in marketing is commitment (2015).

    Consider a small business for a second. They do not have the funds to burn with experimenting with different marketing tactics to see what sticks. These types of businesses need a marketing plan and stay with it. Commitment can be difficult for owners who fear for losing their business and losing unnecessary money. A marketing plan can take weeks or months to start seeing a return. Patience is key here because if you switch up your marketing strategy too soon, you will not see the increases in revenue. However, this is not to say you should never change your original marketing strategy. It is wise to adapt and evolve your marketing plan over time. Stay with the basic structure of your plan and build upon it once you see what tactics are best for reaching your client base.

References

Levinson, Jay Conrad. (2007). Guerilla marketing: Easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business. Fourth edition. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Week 2 - Idea Into Product

 

    Any good company starts with good idea. However, turning that idea into a thriving business it more complicated than expected. This first step to turning an idea into a company is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The Minimum Viable Product is a product with only a basic set of features. It must capture attention of early adopters and make your solution unique (Yu, p. 61)

Many entrepreneurs are perfectionists and they want their first product to be perfect. However, creating a Minimum Viable Product that can be added onto or modified later has its advantages. It lets the company go to market sooner, it allows product testing before a full release, it minimizes production expenses, and it provides insight into your product and customer base. Just like the MVP containing only core features, creating the MVP allows the entrepreneur to focus on the core features and values of the company. The MVP helps steer the entrepreneur on the path to a successful future by focusing not only on features and functionality, but the MVP also drives the entrepreneur towards a well-defined customer based and scalability.

References

Yu, Helen. (2021). Ascend your start-up. Made for Success Publishing.

Week 2 - The Need for Guerilla Marketing

    Marketing comes in all shapes and forms. From websites to signs to ads on t-shirts, marketing is everywhere and anything. An entrepreneur needs to learn all the guerilla marketing techniques. This is especially true if the entrepreneur is in a start-up or small company. While large companies usually take the tactic of throwing money at the problem, small companies cannot afford this. Coca-Cola can easily pay for a Super Bowl ad when a start-up must rely on clever marketing tricks to achieve the same percent growth in sales.

    To see if an entrepreneur is effectively utilizing guerilla marketing, they must ask themselves several questions. Are sales mostly driven by price? If this is true, then people are buying your product because it is cheap, not because it is better. These sales can only increase by further decreasing the price. Do you have a database of customers? This question goes back to my first blog of guerilla marketing about continuing the relationship with the customer. If you do not have a list of customers' contact information and their preferences, then you won't be able to inform them about new product or sales that will increase purchases. Do customers know all the features about your product? If they don't, then the customer will probably not be able to tell your product apart from the competitors or know all what the product offers. If an entrepreneur cannot satisfyingly answer these questions, then they need to rethink their marketing strategies.

References

Levinson, Jay Conrad. (2007). Guerilla marketing: Easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business. Fourth edition. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Week 2 - Tiktok

    TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms. For those that do not know what it exactly is, TikTok is a social media platform that allows people to post short length videos. These videos typically last around 30 seconds. Although most videos are submitted by users, companies have found TikTok to be particularly useful in advertising and customer engagement. Take Gohar khan for instance. He founded a college admissions counseling company. He leverages his TikTok account with over 1.7 million followers to efficiently gain clients (Taylor, 2022).

    While Khan has found success in TikTok, the social media platform might not be effective for every business. The average age of female users is 20 to 29 years old. The average age of male suers is 10 to 19 years old (Campbell, 2022).A company that gears towards an older age group might not have success in TikTok advertising. As I said earlier, the average video length on TikTok is 30 seconds. This short length of time does not give companies much opportunity to educate the consumer on the various features of their product. Instead, companies must use their creativity to create an entertaining video in hopes of driving users to the company website.

References

Campbell, Stefan (April 15, 2022). TikTok statistics 2022: How many users are on TikTok?. The Small Business Blog. https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/tiktok-statistics/

Taylor, Amiah. (May 5, 2022). A 22-year-old TikToker accepted by MIT, Yale, and Stanford is making six figures helping kids get into their dream. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2022/05/05/advice-for-getting-into-dream-college-gohar-khan-tik-tok/amp/

Week 1 - Start-Up Disconnects

    Managing your own business is difficult. Starting one can be even harder. It can be so hard, Helen Yu likened it to climbing Mount Everest. In her book Ascend Your Start-Up she discusses, the disconnects that must be overcome to successful start a business (2021).

    The first enemy of starting a business is the product/mark4et fit disconnect (Yu, 2021). For this disconnect, you must address if your product is viable in the market. This requires you to do research in the market relating to the customers' wants, the value of your product, and the issues with your product. Basically, you need to determine if the customers will want your product.

    The next disconnect is the minimum viable repeatability disconnect (Yu, 2021). Once you determine that customers will buy your product, you release your product out to the customers. This is when you determine if the product can be sold multiple times. If your product is only sold a few times, then that could mean the customer base is not satisfied with your product, and it is back to the drawing board.

    Once you prove that your product will be sold many times, you then have to face the customer voice disconnect, product disconnect, and measurement disconnect. To complete this hurdle, you must be able to receive criticism from the customers. You then take that criticism and improve the existing design or expand the product list to meet the customers' demands. This is when performance measurements can come in handy. Based on the customer feedback, you need to adjust your performance measurements to include this feedback. If these measurements are properly
 met, you can reasonably assume you are meeting your customers' wants and needs.

References

Yu, Helen. (2021). Ascend your start-up. Made for Success Publishing.

Week 1 - Automation and AI

    In the past decade or so, artificial intelligence has risen to prominence and it's not going away. In fact, it's becoming increasingly prevalent
with every passing day. When it comes to artificial intelligence, people think of news articles predicting futures with self driving cars and robots that are identical to humans.

    That future is closer than we expect. Current day robots in manufacturing are mainly big machines stuck in one spot that perform a specific task. For instance, a machine will install an engine to a car then pass the car along a track to the next machine to install the battery. Artificial intelligence is building the next generation of manufacturing to create autonomous robots that can freely move around the warehouse. Boston Dynamics has creating robots that can pick up boxes and walk around. Pair those robots with a software that can map out the most efficient routes over time, and you now have a group of robots that can quickly stock expansive warehouses incredibly quickly.

    Physical robots are not the only thing that benefits from artificial intelligence. Software like Excel has been used to automate routine, labor-intensive work. Now, software can use AI to complete more sophisticated tasks life data analytics. After all, artificial intelligence and machine learning is all about analyzing data. The data analysis has become so complex the software can almost analyze the data like a human. We may still be far from software thinking like a human, but artificial intelligence is here to stay and is improving every day.

Week 1 - Guerilla Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

    Marketing has been around as long as businesses have been around. Marketing is every point of contact a business has with the world. This includes the logo, how your goods are manufactured, email signature, web sites, everything. As human civilization has evolved over time, so too has marketing. The marketing thought process of business has evolved from traditional marketing into guerilla marketing. Traditional marketing involves investing money into advertising to gain new customers and outdoing the competition. Guerilla marketing, however, invests time, energy, and creativity to have long lasting customers.  

    The real key difference between traditional marketing and guerilla marketing is building relationship with the customer. Traditional marketing is focused on sales dollars and new customers. Guerilla marketing emphasizes building a customer base and following up with those customers. Traditional marketing shows linear growth by simply adding new customers. Guerilla marketing achieves geometric growth by continuing to engage with existing customer in each sales cycle which can lead to an increase in the size of each transaction and can lead to customers referring their acquaintances to the business. Businesses that use guerilla marketing also have a less decline in existing customers because they continually interact with their customer base. 

    

References

Levinson, Jay Conrad. (2007). Guerilla marketing: Easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits     from your small business. Fourth edition. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Week 1 - MBA 6101 Introduction

 Hello!

    My name is Jacob Schertz. I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and grew up in the Midwest. I currently live in Springfield, Illinois. I earned my bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have been mainly working in supply chain ever since and I love it. I am currently a supply chain analyst for a consulting company. I help different businesses improve their procurement and logistics processes.

    When I am not working, I enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy books and going to art museums. I am also a big movie buff and try to watch a new movie every week. After working, I blow off steam by lifting weights. On the weekends, I usually invite friends over for board games or go to trivia nights.

Van Gogh exhibit at the Indianapolis Art Museum